Civil Rights: My Participation in the Last Day of the
Selma-Montgomery MarchRev. Dr. Janet E. Wolfe
Montgomery AL, March 25, 1965

[Original
letter: March 29, 1965, revised August 21, 2014]

With the entire nation, we in Boulder, Colorado, were shocked and
sickened by the brutal attack on Negro marchers in Selma, Alabama, March
7, 1965. The following Sunday a group of men from Boulder, including the
Rev. Wally Toevs, Presbyterian university pastor at the University of
Colorado, Roy Mersky, law librarian, Phil Danielson, CU regent, Leslie
Fishman, economics professor, and Willard Conrow, active layperson from
First Presbyterian Church, Boulder, went to Selma, hoping to participate
in a subsequent march. They were present in Montgomery on March 16, and
had received permission to observe the demonstration at the municipal
buildings. They became involved in the resulting meele when mounted
possemen attacked. The possemen were composed largely of "rednecks"
hurriedly deputized for the occasion, wearing cowboy hats and wielding
canes and clubs on the non-violent demonstrators.

The control that Martin Luther King and his aides have over these
demonstrations is tenuous, but it is a marvelous example of nonviolent
resistance. The student demonstrators either hold hands and sing, or, if
the attack is especially vicious, they cover their heads and crouch.
They do not move unless the leader so directs. The Boulder men, although
they were on the opposite side of the street, became involved in the
attack. None was injured. Three horsemen would club a demonstrator to
the ground. Other demonstrators would fall on the injured one to prevent
more clubbing. A Japanese-American student from Pennsylvania who was
injured was standing near Rev. Wally Toevs. He was clubbed down and then
dragged unconscious down the sidewalk by the feet with his head bumping
on the walk.

After this attack, the demonstrators were driven about six blocks back
into the Negro section of town. A Montgomery motorcycle policeman
charged into the crowd and ran over a number of people. Again, the
control of the demonstration was superb. The policeman was not injured
in spite of the anger of the crowd. When we received word of this in
Boulder, we sent a number of telegrams to congressmen recommending
federalization of troops.

Throughout the week, we received further reports about the sickening
state of affairs. One woman whom Rev. Wally Toevs interviewed, a cook at
Brown Chapel, gathering place of the movement in Selma, had been with
the movement for about two years. She had been fired from her
housekeeping job for this activity and is currently unemployed. She said
that the Alabama Negroes can afford to fight, for they have nothing to
lose but their lives. "They feed us sowbelly and corn pones in jail.
They think that is mean, but it is not a hardship to us because we eat
that all the time." She explained that her father was a sharecropper for
a white landlord. They had always received a portion of the crop too
small to sustain them all year. They would then have to borrow from the
landlord and thus were always in debt, preventing them from leaving his
service.

Meanwhile, George Williams, a Boulder businessman and former Democratic
county chairman, began investigating the possibility of chartering a
plane to Montgomery in the event that the march was approved. We were
able to fill the 90-seat plane and a 33 seat bus. I took the bus. We
encountered our first difficulty, probably a minor one in retrospect, in
Jonesboro, Arkansas. Our bus driver at that point, a white southerner,
was not particularly sympathetic. He made an unscheduled stop, and three
punks in the depot shouted a few choice epithets, such as "Heil,
Hitler!" and "Go Home."

In Memphis, Tennessee, we really began to feel the hostility, although
there were no incidents there. Crossing into Mississippi we felt was
like entering Nazi Germany, exemplified clearly by the bus driver's
remark at the port of entry: "Well, I'll go in and pay off the Gestapo."
There is a bus permit required in Mississippi (at least for us). In
order to avoid arrest for that charge, the driver paid for the permit,
giving our destination as Daytona Beach. We were detained for 30
minutes, during which time we discovered an empty whisky bottle on the
bus. One of the "Gestapo's" favorite tricks is to arrest civil rights
workers for illegal transportation of liquor. We disposed of the bottle
(I won't say where!) but we feared that we would be searched. We were
not, however, and no other incidents occurred in Mississippi.

... My first impression in the daylight in Alabama was the beauty of
the land juxtaposed on this rotten mess. This is a real tragedy of the
situation. The climate is pleasant, and the resources, at least in
Alabama, are quite plentiful. Yet the substance is wasted on hate and
bigotry.

We arrived at 6:30 a.m. at St. Jude's, the Catholic compound where the
marchers made camp the last night. They were just breaking camp. One of
the first groups we encountered there was from Tougaloo College,
Mississippi, a Negro school. An active SNCC worker from there had been
in Boulder last year. We marched with this group. The march did not get
underway until noon, because, we heard, Dr. King was being served a
summons for the suit brought by the franchised bus line in Selma. SCLC
had been running a line for Negroes boycotting the segregated city
busses. During our wait we encountered many fascinating people.

... The Montgomery Advertiser's editorial page is typical of
southern newspapers. The first editorial, entitled "Silence,"urged the
citizens to ignore the rabble. The second was a sarcastic essay about a
cat who was not satisfied with catching sparrrows but was waiting at the
maid's door to capture the fat parrots inside. It closed with: "We don't
wanna hurt. We just want you to get the hell home." The third made
reference to Montgomery as the seat of the last battle of the Civil War.
(It was 1965, not 1865!). Throughout the editorials and open forum,
demonstrators were called beatniks, pseudo-clergy, paid agitators,
unemployed scum who must not have families; otherwise they wouldn't have
time to leave their hearthsides, etc. A later paper printed a comment
from a white observer. "Ugh! The filth! I felt so contaminated that I
had to gargle before I could eat."

Among the "filthy beatniks" we encountered were two Yale professors, the
president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and many other dignitaries.
(SFTS students were doing logistics for the march, such as setting up tents
and cleaning up campgrounds.) The real heroes of the movement are not the
dignitaries, but the Alabama Negroes. One woman with whom I visited described
the fear of the police. They extend no significant protection to the Negro
community; cases involving two Negro parties are seldom prosecuted, brutality
is a constant fear, worse in Birmingham than in Montgomery, Negro police have
no jurisdiction over whites, and of course, a white man has little fear if he
commits a crime against a Negro. I fear that many white travelers in the South
have failed to experience this feeling of the police state which so haunts the
civil rights workers, for white southerners are usually very gracious people
as long as one does not upset the segregationist system.

There were many signs carried by marchers. One was a brilliant blue, orange
and white, saying "God is color-blind." Another, an Episcopal creation, showed
a crucifix, half white, half black, with barbed wires running through the
body.

After wading in a mixture of mud, rain, and old orange peels for 5
hours, we began marching through the Negro section. The spectators were
jubilant. There were many old people and mothers with small children.
One woman in a wheelchair was vigorously waving with both hands. Then
the iceberg descended! We entered the white community. Most people made
no response at all. Downtown, there were many people looking out
windows; in one building there were a number of whites and one Negro.
The Negro was very reluctant to smile and wave, but he finally responded
to our encouragement.

Local dignitaries sat stony-faced in a balcony at the Jefferson Davis
Hotel. We waved. There was no response. We heard surprisingly few crank
remarks; a few punks delivered some on one corner, but the army cast a
pall on this sort of activity. When we arrived at the capitol, we were
seated on the pavement that extended solidly beyond the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church, a long block from the capitol. This church was where
Martin Luther King began the bus boycott in 1956. Among the galling
things we saw were the confederate flags sewn on the federalized
National Guardsmen's uniforms. A Montgomery policeman not far from me
tightly gripped his billy club and glared all afternoon.

At 3 p.m. the mass meeting began. Speakers included Andrew Young, Albert
Turner, leader of the Marion, Alabama group, Amelia Boynton, leader of
the Selma movement who was injured on the bridge, Dr Ralph Bunche, A.
Philip Randolph, and Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King's speech was quite
political in tone. The Negro revolution, he said, is part of the
twentieth century and must be successful if the Great Society is to
work. This speech is the source of his well known saying, "The arc of
the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." He talked about
segregation and inferior education, and the need to have access to the
ballot box to remedy these conditions. "Selma, Alabama, has become a
shining moment in the conscience of man. If the worst in American life
lurked in the dark streets, the best of American instincts arose
passionately from across the nation to overcome it." [This paragraph
added in the 2014 revision.]

... Our reasons for going: Many people ask why "outside agitators" go
to Alabama. We are not outside agitators, we are citizens of the United
States, and Alabama was not being run according to the principles of
democratic government. The unconcerned people of Nazi Germany minded
their own business while Hitler rose and murdered six million Jews. The
right to vote is basic and non-negotiable. It is not a right that has to
be earned, but a right that has existed since the founding of the
nation. It has been expanded throughout the history of the country and
has included Negroes for 95 years prior to the march. The South would
continue to defy the Constitution and their moral responsibility without
a great deal of pressure from the rest of the nation. We went also so
that we might have a better picture of the situation in the South in
order to make a deeper impression on the more complacent citizens of
this nation.

No, we do not think the North, or Boulder, is perfect. There is housing
discrimination, unemployment, inferior education, and some discrimination in
public accommodations. We are working on test cases in these areas. Various
groups at CU are raising funds for SNCC, CORE (which works primarily in the
North), and SCLC. All of us can help by applying pressure for strong voting
legislation, for support of the challenge of the Mississippi delegation in the
House of Representatives this summer, and for local fair housing.

The Sunday after our return we held a meeting of the three groups that
went to Alabama. It was volcanic. The entire 130 people are so incensed
that they are determined that "We Shall Overcome."

...At a mass meeting following the return of the six Boulder men that
went to Selma and Montgomery earlier, Rev. Wally Toevs read the
following from Albert Camus' The Plague. [My translation from the
French.]

"Listen, in effect, to the crises of cheerfulness that rise in the village;
the laughs that often accompany this cheerfulness are always menacing. For one
knows that this crowd lives ignorant joy, although they could read it in
books; that the bacillus of the plague neither dies or ever disappears, but
rests for dozens of years dormant in the furniture and the linens, waits
patiently in the bedrooms, the wine-cellars, the handkerchiefs, the waste
paper, that sometime the day will come, for the sickness and instruction of
man, when the plague will reawaken in the rats and bring death upon the happy
city."

As the spring of 1965 wore on, and I completed my master's thesis on the
political philosophy of the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, I decided that
I would apply to attend San Francisco Theological Seminary in the fall,
rather than doing further graduate studies. It seemed to me that going
to the last day of the Selma March was something like going to church on
Easter, but that my commitment to the cause required further action. So
I, along with Richard Krushnic and Pam Mausner, also students at CU,
applied to the Summer Community Organization and Political Education
(SCOPE) project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. [added
2014]